![]() ![]() It analyses the language used in their songs-Sichuan Chengdu Mandarin, Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) and English-before and after they signed with 88rising, the media company that brought the group to the West. ![]() Because rap is an intensely verbal art, this article explores how the Higher Brothers construct and negotiate their complicated and multiple (local, national and global) identities from the perspective of language. This presents a new case study to further examine the dynamics between the global and the local. As rap music-originally a local, ethnic African American culture in the United States-has been continually relocal-ized all over the world and thus globalized, the Higher Brothers have undergone another process of glocalization. ![]() The Chengdu-based quartet Higher Brothers recently became the first China-born hip hop group to gain global fame. I then conclude that this hyper-containment should inform policy in Chicago, particularly policy that relates to young people on the city’s South and West sides, and call for further research into drill, what I believe to be a tremendously significant yet under-researched cultural form. This hyper-containment, I determine, resulted from the fallout of the demolition of the city’s high-rise housing projects (part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation) and the gang fragmentation that followed the prosecution of many of Chicago’s gang leaders in the 1990s. My research suggests that a sense of hyper-containment underlies drill’s non-engagement with mobility, or what I deem the subgenre’s inward turn. This project is highly interdisciplinary: the contextualization of the departure relies on history and urban studies the consideration of the extent of the departure incorporates content analysis and literary studies the discussion of the significance of drill turns to cultural studies and political science. This project explores drill’s departure from hip-hop’s traditional aesthetics and messaging, considering what about Chicago gave rise to this departure, the extent to which the departure categorizes the subgenre, and what the departure says about the counter-public of young people that create and consume drill rap in the city. Unlike most hip hop, drill is outwardly unconcerned with mobility. To that end, I think through both the ways that queer artists render themselves and how queerness is used asĭrill rap, a subgenre of hip-hop intimately connected to Chicago street life and brought into the nation’s musical mainstream by Chicago rapper Chief Keef, sounds and means differently than traditional forms of hip-hop. The discussion is meant to be exemplary, although certainly not exhaustive of the wide-ranging-and still developing-historiography of queer or queer/LGBT hip hop artists. This chapter is meant to index and codify the ways that queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) hip hop artists have negotiated their artistic work lives alongside a changing landscape related to queerness, Blackness, and hip hop. These mappings give a broad view of how queer hip hop artists emerged, submerged, and reemerged in mainstream hip hop cultural productions-sometimes as quirky outcasts or human interest stories, at other times as actors poised to take over the mainstream stage, and at still other times, as performers whose queerness is identified through musical genealogies and social media musings. The second mapping picks up in the 2000s by turning to new iterations of sonic, identificatory, and affective queerness in the work of millennial hip hop artists. The first mapping starts in the late 1970s, wherein I look to articulations of Black heteromasculinity vis-à-vis an imagined queer foil and then I turn to the first recorded queer hip hop group, Age of Consent, founded in 1981. This chapter maps two contemporary moments related to queer performers inside hip hop culture. The discussion details the notable queer artists, some known and some forgotten, who have made possible the seeming ease with which queer and queer-friendly artists emerging in the 2000s and afterward have captured audiences in multiple mainstream areas. Starting in the late 1970s and ending in the current moment, this historiography argues that queer and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) artists in hip hop music have chartered and navigated perilous landscapes-in the music industry, in hip hop culture, and in the broader US pop terrain. And Keywords This chapter explores the relatively long history of the queer presence inside of hip hop cultural production. ![]()
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